


72 Hours

by querxes



Category: Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death, Five Stages of Grief, Graphic Description of Corpses, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Missing Persons, Murder, Violence, but more bittersweet than happy im sorry, im really sorry for that bit, kind of, not overly violent but its there, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24764365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/querxes/pseuds/querxes
Summary: It was raining on the day they found David Jacobs’ body.
Relationships: David Jacobs & Jack Kelly, Racetrack Higgins & Jack Kelly, Racetrack Higgins/David Jacobs, Spot Conlon/Racetrack Higgins (mentioned)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 41





	72 Hours

**Author's Note:**

> This is two years of built-up emotion spilled onto an empty doc in the middle of the day out of the blue. I honestly don't care if anyone reads it since it is a vent fic, but I just wanted to get it out of my system. It's not happy. Fortunately, none of my experience with very personal grief has been caused by murder, but hey, sometimes you just write what you write. Please let me know if there's something that is left out of the tags and I will fix it right away.

It was raining on the day they found David Jacobs’ body. 

In fact, it had rained for the three days he had gone missing. Just like that, he was gone. He vanished without a trace, most likely the evidence washed away by the rain. The weather had perfectly fit the dread that lingered in the pit of Race’s stomach until it snapped like a rubber band when Jack had called him outside of his dorm building at 8 P.M., telling him to grab his things and come out front so he could talk to him. He already knew. (The first 72 hours are the most critical, he remembered reading. After that, they’re practically following a cold trail or finding a murder scene. They found the body at 80 hours.)

That night, Jack drove them back home. (It was a miracle they didn’t crash.) Medda was already waiting for them at the door. Race all but collapsed into her arms, sobbing for the third time that night. The first was when he started throwing his bare essentials in a bag, already knowing what Jack was doing standing outside the building. The second time was when he opened the doors and actually saw his brother standing there, clothes drenched in rain and his face red from crying and scrubbing a fist into the sockets of his eyes.

The dread hurt the most. It was like being suspended from the ceiling, arms and legs tied up at the perfect angle for the chest to dangle completely exposed. Even knowing Davey was —was  _ gone,  _ the cords still didn’t cut. It ached and twisted at his gut. It wouldn’t let him go. Even attempting to cut the cords himself, trying to saw them off bit by bit, to bite through them hard enough, did not free him from the bonds.

It wasn’t real. The details didn’t piece themselves together in his mind and everyone else’s for a long time. There was a body, but no suspect as far as they knew. They said it was strangulation and blunt force trauma that killed him. His body laid there for three days before they found him. Apparently, no one saw or heard the murder, which sounded like a bunch of  _ bullshit _ to Race. It was Davey’s body, surrounded by trash, and no, Race couldn’t see the body. And the worst part of it all was that they couldn’t  _ bury  _ him right away like his family wanted to. He waited, utterly alone, laying on an examination table while strangers studied him over and over again with an emotional detachment that came with just doing their jobs.

So no, Davey wasn’t dead. It wasn’t real. Davey had taken a vacation and lost his phone or simply forgot to answer Race’s texts, or he moved out of the country and decided to become a recluse in the mountains, or he was taking place in a top secret government research project. He was gone, but he wasn’t dead. No way was he dead, not while they still had a whole life to live, not when they hadn’t even gotten to graduate from college together or get their master’s degrees and doctorates together or buy a house together and _ get married together,  _ have kids together and come home from work to see each other every night and  _ be with each other every day  _ and die as happy old men surrounded by their children and grandchildren. They would always go at the same time, that’s always how it went for Race.

Davey had been smiling the last time Race saw him. He was on the top of the world, he had just gotten a near perfect score on his test and praises from his favorite professor. He met Race at their favorite little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Manhattan and they celebrated the small victory before splitting ways to head to their respective dorms. They promised to FaceTime that night. They texted each other back and forth on the walk before Davey’s end went silent, but Race figured that his phone must’ve died or he had put his phone in his pocket to cross the street. Minutes turned into an hour and Jack called when Davey wasn’t home by the time he usually was. No one knew where he was and he wasn’t answering his texts or calls from anyone. Turns out, his phone was sitting in his back pocket for the entire time he laid in that alley. It no longer worked from all the water damage.

The days passed by in a haze. Crutchie had come home all the way from Boston, got time off from his fancy Harvard pre-med classes. Jack was always there. He looked like shit  _ all the time,  _ like someone had dunked him underwater and kicked him around a bit and killed his puppy in front of him. The bags under his eyes and the tears and the snot didn’t stop coming for a long time. It was hard to watch.

Davey was Jack’s best friend. Yeah, Race guessed Jack had a lot of “best” friends, but none of them stuck around and put up with him like Davey did. Crutchie and Race were already Jack’s brothers, so Davey was the one to be crowned best friend. Jesus, they were close. They had some strange bond, one that Race couldn’t even decipher. They just always knew what the other was thinking, sometimes only having to say the other’s name. They were practically damn platonic soulmates, they loved each other like hell and stuck out through the worst of it, had the weird late-night conversations others would never hear. Jack had lost a brother.

But Race still didn’t truly understand that Davey was gone. He cried like hell every once in a while and threw explosive tantrums, but just because he felt  _ wrong. _ Like part of his life was missing, because it was, and he knew but didn’t  _ know  _ what it was. He never saw the body, so he didn’t know for sure he was dead. No, he wasn’t dead. It was hard to explain. They told him he should visit a psychiatrist and talk out his feelings, but he felt too wrong to actually follow through and go. He still had classes, life still moved on, it was just empty and missing a whole lot of meaning.

There was no consolation when the police found the murderer. It was just a face he didn’t recognize —according to the officers, Davey never knew him either—and it was all too much to realize that he was seeing a picture of the man who killed Davey. That he was sitting in the courtroom looking at the man who  _ killed Davey Jacobs. _ God, no consolation. 

He was a no-namer, no close friends or family. No criminal records, but he did have a history of being violent. No one would’ve guessed he would become a murderer. He was fifty years old, a big man (bigger, taller than Davey) with big hands that they explained he wrapped around Davey’s neck and  _ squeezed _ —

No consolation.

There was no known motive. Apparently, the guy snapped. He was angry, he wanted someone else to feel his pain. He hid the body pretty damn good when he realized what he had done. The police found the body amongst a pile of trash bags when the residents of the surrounding apartments complained about the smell _. _

He was a good man who lost his temper in a rare fit. That was what the defense attorney had said. They wanted an insanity plea. Apparently, he had visited the school psychologist thirty-something years ago. Of course, it wasn’t enough because the examiners never found any signs of mental illness, so the man was hauled off to prison to serve a life sentence

They never let Race see the body, but he imagined what it would look like late at night when he found he couldn’t sleep. Lifeless eyes, face too pale, bruised neck, burst blood vessels in his cheeks, blue lips, hands delicately folded in his lap, blood cascading from the back of his head onto the brick wall behind him. Maybe his expression was peaceful, maybe it was horrified. Maybe the man had the decency to shut Davey’s eyes and let him rest. The point was, he looked like he was only sleeping. But he still wasn’t gone to Race. He had all the proof that he was in front of him, but no body to look at and say, “holy shit, he’s  _ dead.” _

Crutchie said that it was a good thing that he was not allowed to see the body. It would never be as pretty as Race could imagine it to be. Crutchie understood he was having a really hard time coping with it, but seeing the body wouldn’t make it any better. He hated Crutchie for saying it and not explaining why, but immediately regretted looking up the stages of human decomposition.

Suddenly, Davey’s pretty-dream-dead-body had turned into a bloated, waterlogged corpse with sick blue-green skin, face almost unrecognizable, a bloody foam leaking from his mouth and nose. His hair and teeth were falling out, and maggots were feasting on his flesh. Race would never have been able to tell that Davey’s last facial expression was fear.

Davey became a monster in death.

Jesus, it wasn’t  _ fair. _ Race looked through his camera roll every waking hour of the day, forced his mind to micro-analyze every single little blemish, every freckle, every beautiful  _ living  _ smile, the way his hair swooped and curled at the back of his neck when he let it grow a little too long, the way his nose jutted out just perfectly, the way his dark eyes lit up when he was excited about something, the way his face reddened and his palms stretched out when he got frustrated, the way his face softened when he looked at Race. This was the Davey he loved, the one he tried to remember.

Race couldn’t help but be terrified of the recreation he had made of his boyfriend, the boy he thought one day he would get to marry. The images wouldn’t leave his head. Davey’s simple wooden casket at the funeral was almost unapproachable, knowing that the monster that haunted his dreams hid just under the lid. Would the corpse be as bad as he imagined it to be? He was so ashamed of himself.

The funeral was agony. It was beautiful, pictures of Davey everywhere, him as a long-limbed, lanky child (like a fawn, Esther said, knobby knees and these huge doey eyes, he always looked so much like her) and him as a high school graduate and him at his bar mitzvah and him with Sarah and Les and with him and his parents and him with Jack and him with Race. A celebration of life, but it felt dead and mournful and  _ Davey was dead. _ Race turned green when he saw the casket. The lid stayed shut the entire time, but they wouldn’t have lifted the lid anyways, as a sign of respect for the body. Race had never been to a Jewish funeral before. He found he understood it more than he did the giant Roman Catholic ones with the wide open casket and corpse dressed and painted to the nines.

In the days where nothing mattered, Race drowned himself in videos of Davey’s mind-boggling presentations, him opening his Hanukkah gifts, him laughing at some dumb joke Race cracked only to hush himself in the library, him surprising Race with flowers at his recitals (even though he did it every time), them at the beach and Davey instantly getting sunburnt and complaining about it because “Race, how are you so lucky to have naturally-tanning skin?” and them celebrating after one of Race’s successful expos and Davey half-drunk squeezing a rubber chicken into a tune and looking oh-so pensive as Race played the bit of Für Elise Davey taught him on the piano. There were so many videos, mostly because Race was so obsessed with filming him. 

But that hospital-stained self-implanted memory always intruded in on his mind sooner or later. Now, he could only smell the sterile morgue, which he was thankful for, because before he had imagined the smell of rotting flesh, had heard the maggots crawling over an expanse of skin he couldn’t recognize, the body propped up against a brick wall among bags of trash, even though he now knew that the body was decomposing six feet under.

No matter how many times it seemed Race pulled the white cloth over Davey’s head, it never stayed on. His own morbid curiosity always ripped it off in the middle of the night.

David Jacobs, remember him, the public kept saying. Another student was murdered in cold blood. He was a rare male nursing major who was going on to save lives that he never got to save, someone’s son who was taken too soon. 

“I knew him from class, he was nice. Never really talked to him, but he could’ve been my best friend in a world where he wasn’t, y’know,  _ strangled.” _

“It’s a shame that it always happens to the bleeding-heart types, he probably tried to talk his killer into seeing a psychologist.”

“It’s sad his family will never get to see him graduate. I heard he was a brilliant, compassionate student and a good friend.” 

Some people argued that he was off-campus when he was murdered, so he couldn’t be held to the same standard that a victim of a school shooting was, that he didn’t really  _ need  _ to be remembered, and some even had the gall to pin the blame on Davey himself. They were just stupid  _ fucking  _ comments.

Back at Jack’s (and Davey’s) university, pictures of Davey were plastered everywhere, tiny little vigils staggered across the campus, people he didn’t even know would shake their heads and tear up when they looked at the picture for a bit too long. It was a nice picture of him, it was a great picture actually. Mostly, they all used the same one. A simple headshot of him that was done for his clinical identification with a neutral, closed-mouth smile and a clean and simple white shirt.

Race could see why the girls would cry over the picture. He looked innocent, pure, distinguished, incredibly handsome. He looked like the type of guy you could take home to your parents and the parents would actually thank you for it. But that was only the surface stuff. They didn’t get to see Davey when he was tipsy and stumbled on his perfect vocabulary, how he looked when he cried after a terrible argument and the world seemed to be crashing down. They weren’t the one to hold his hand, to study the surface of his fingertips, to laugh at his stupid little faces and unhumorous jokes and foolish behavior when no one else was looking except for a very close, very lucky group of friends who all loved him.

They all liked to ask Race if he was okay back at his university. Did he look okay? He wondered if he looked  _ dead _ yet, and then he remembered what Davey’s body probably looked like now, and then he pulled out the videos of Davey sneezing into the camera and Davey holding a snake for the first time and Davey laughing when Race tripped on the pothole as they were walking down the sidewalk.

Months later, people who hardly even knew Race started asking him when he would finally move on, find a new boyfriend. It’s been long enough, he needs to learn to become happy again. So the smiles came back slowly, and no one mentioned the strange, spaced-off look Race got sometimes. Except for one person, but they would never,  _ never  _ dare to mention it again. He began to throw himself back into his work again, calculating numbers and velocities at a rate that made the professors’ heads spin. He called Jack and Crutchie every day, visited his friends, who all seemed to be in a state of weariness every time they gathered (because they were still missing a person, and no, he wasn’t just running late). He still called Esther and Mayer, and Sarah and Les, who was fourteen and already curving onto his fifteenth.

Life moved on. Slowly, with searing anger and aching despair, and his dreams were crushed but he would keep living for Davey, he would move on for Davey, because that was what Davey would want him to do. He would sit him down and explain to him that “this isn’t healthy for you, I know you’ll always love me and I’ll always love you but you need to find your happiness again, you still have a long life ahead of you.”

And he did. It took years, but he was reintroduced to Spot Conlon, one of the guys he went to college with who studied Mechanical Engineering, who now owned his own repair shop and was still kind of an asshole, but  _ hot damn. _ He didn’t live too far from Race, who was now working for NASA and raising money for local and international hospitals and trauma centers that heavily focused on nursing in a fund that he, Sarah, Les, and Jack had created under Davey’s name. The world would not forget under their watch.

Race still remembered and loved and missed Davey, but life is super long, way too long to spend all of it dwelling on what could’ve been. Davey would be waiting, and Race was excited to see the day, but he would wait. He had a family that needed him here. He had a husband named Spot who was a bit of an asshole but was a lovely, kind, and caring asshole and two, upcoming three beautiful kids, one named David entirely by coincidence who the adoption agency thought would be a perfect fit for their family, and a dog that was so stupid that they almost named  _ him  _ Race. It was a life that hurt and healed, that brought him tears of sorrow and tears of joy, and boiling anger and bubbling laughter.

The nightmares would come again when the man serving jail time for Davey’s murder would have a parole hearing, or when he would see an old article on the case online, or when he would hear about a nurse who was murdered or a college student who was beaten to death or a new missing persons case in their area popped up, or sometimes for what seemed to be no reason out of the blue. The difference is that he had a husband who held him close and let him sob into his shoulder without ever showing a drop of jealousy, who kept him reassured and stable, and he had years worth of beautiful, joyful memories that he spent bathing himself in and a beautiful family and the greatest friends who did sometimes share tears with him now and again, but they all made it through somehow. 72 hours turned into a lifetime, but he wasn’t alone now and he never would be.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry.
> 
> Come yell at me on tumblr @thetruthabouttheboy or my main @querxes


End file.
